Ricoh concept camera makes spherical panoramic images in one shot

Ricoh exhibited a concept camera at CP+ that captures spherical panoramic images and sends them wirelessly to a smartphone or tablet. 'The idea is, the pictures you take arrive automatically,' [in the phone] said a Ricoh representative (via DigInfo.tv translation).

Apparently produced mainly to gauge market reaction, Ricoh released no technical info on the camera apart from the fact that it uses two opposed 180-degree lenses whose images it combines into one spherical panorama. Users can zoom in on the image elements and swipe to look around the sphere; they can also zoom out to a circular image. The company imagines printing images on spheres as a potential product concept, and is considering video capture as well as stills.

I can't believe this! It just happens in a one shot, thats so cool! I want to use this at least one time. In the market you can also find different types of watermark software. To know more please visit www.masswatermark.com

Nothing new here. Pentax proposed an even nicer concept some years ago,but many other did. http://www.sandydan.com/photo/wide/sphere/nikonlrg.jpgStitching two emispheres brings some problems to the final result. You need a quite perfect fisheye lens, with a very corrected CA and fringging down to the very border. Let's say more. You need more than 180 degrees, 200 at least, an incredible flare resistance and a very precise exposition and synchro of WB, or you will ALWAYS see the stitching seam, fisheyes must be closer or you will have a large blind area!Then is better to use a squared, or a 4/3 sensor, in order not to throw away a lot of black pixels. Let's say they use a 24MP apsc sensor. The circle dia would be 4000 pixel. Cut edges, overlap area etc. and you end up with a 3500x7000 panoramic image. I stitch panoramas since 1998, and project software and panoheads since 2003. I've seen it all, nobody is doing a really GOOD non-stitching camera

You might be able to wear it as a hat - like one of those "propellor hats". Certainly any advantage of being able to take street shots without pointing the camera directly at the subject might be lost by the attention generated by the hat. Certainly you would be able to see what was going on behind your back and watch out for knives being planted there. Sounds like a great tool for big business and politicians.

Or make it into a regular lens and then go about holding your camera on your head? Image to smartphone seems better.

Not a new concept - my old 360 One VR from Kaidan parabolic mirror lets me do that with a number of my cameras, but the resolution is low. Having a small device like this might gain some traction in the real estate market for low-cost walk-through photos but I can't see it replacing serious pano work with panoramic heads and high resolution photos.

Interesting that mobile viewer he's running shows a "Share to Facebook" icon - AFAIK Facebook has dropped support for the few panorama viewing apps that were prototyped on their service. Panoramic photography won't be coming to the masses until the popular social media platforms support some standardized panorama rendering engines, be they QTVR, Flash, HTML5 or whatever.

The biggest issue with these types of cameras is the resolution of the captured image. To get any decent resolution, you are going to have to have a LOT of megapixels (gigapixel for anything realistic). Lotsa mpxls/mb and wifi to phone/tablet usually don't jive too well if you have a lot of photos or are in a hurry or have limited storage space, and definitely not for a data plan.

The built-in panoramic functions of most compact cameras suffer similar fates, giving you a panorama of maybe 5mb up to 20mb in size if you are lucky. To get detailed panoramas, you really need to get up above 50mb, and that is just for a 360* pano with one plane. For a 360 sphere, you would need at least 3x that for detail. So far as I know, that is only done manually, outside the camera, on a potent computer (maybe Defense industry has in-camera tech, but we will never know).

All that being said, I love the idea/concept. Please give us options for different resolutions!

This would work well for shots taken in fairly large spaces (church interiors, landscape), but there are problems with tight places like car interiors or when there are objects close by at the stitching seam area. This is because there is a slight parallax error as the lenses can not be at the same spot, this does not happen with nodal point panorama heads, which, on the other hand, are clumsy and slow.

Perhaps it can be redesigned to kill the distance between the lenses and diminish the parallax problem? Maybe it would be possible with some back-to-back sensors arrangement.Using three lenses seems more sensible, as their FOV would overlap so much that seamless stitching would be flawless.However, this has a lot of potential, worthy of further exploration. I like it.

Could be cool to use for security with wifi sending images in say 3 second intervals of stills. Mount it in a dome and attach to interior exterior of home with motion detector car or entry or helmet ect.

I understood your idea, but the issue still remains... you'd be taking only one shot when you need two! Your idea needs two lenses, two cameras aligned and in synch, which isn't far from some extreme 360º setups.This effort by Ricoh does it all.

I dont think you get it. The idea is to use the camera body for battery and processor ect so you slap this on with its own sensors and lenses. the camera body has all the expensive stuff to make this better and cheaper.

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